All posts tagged ‘rubiks cube’

My dog ate the Rubik’s Cube. You can see her, even last summer, visualizing the attack. That’s a seriously self-satisfied Labrador. Sheesh.

In the answer to this week’s puzzle, Patrick points out a couple cool things I didn’t notice. First, the puzzle:

What are the possible perimeters of my family’s irregularly shaped Rubik’s Cube with one cube removed? Does it matter which cube my dog chewed off — the corner, center-side, or center? For the purpose of this puzzle, consider all cubes to be regular, 1.4cm to the side with no space between.

Patrick noticed that, “In all three cases, the resulting volume of the large cube is equal. Removing a corner cube does not change the surface area of the large cube.” Every once in a while I’m smacked in the head with the frying pan of the appropriateness of my inclusion at this blog. This is one of those cases. Who out there joins me in thinking these things are surprisingly cool? Dude.

In any case, missing a corner block, the perimeter is 58.4 cm; missing and edge block, the perimeter is 64.4 cm; and missing a center block, it’s 67.2 cm. It seems that a notable frequent solver of the puzzle forgot that the removed block would leave new, interior edges that would technically now be “perimeter” (in addition to removing the edges that were once there). You know who you are. And by my reckoning this is your first incorrect answer in about a year. Let me be the first to say: muahahahahaha! (And cheers.)

The reason I bring up Patrick is that, finally, his name was pulled from the pool of correct entrants as this week’s winner! Congratulations! The world’s riches will be yours, all yours! Or at least a $50 gift certificate from our spectacular sponsor, ThinkGeek.

Imagine you have a cube with sides of 1.4cm each. And you attach to its faces six flat squares, each on a little stick so that they sit 1.4cm away from the central cube. Now around these squares-on-sticks you pack cubes equal in size to the central cube until you’ve filled in all the spaces and you have a new cube, each face of which is composed of six squares, 1.4cm to the side. Imagine you hook the interiors of all the peripheral cubes together so they can slide around each other. You would have an extremely neat little mechanism. And if you had invented it in 1974, you would have the world’s best-selling toy — to date, the Rubik’s Cube has sold more than 400 million copies.

At my house, the family Cube has seen better days. That is because we have a young Labrador. Said Labrador assumes that when everyone leaves the house, we are never coming back and she might as well adjust the decor to her liking. This includes first bringing everything from inside, outside, and then chewing it to little bits as time and energy permit. The Cube recently got her treatment. But I’m happy to say we returned a bit too soon, interrupting her careful disintegration of the world’s most popular toy.

She only managed to remove one small cube.

So, finally, here’s the question:

To calculate the perimeter of a square, you multiply a side by four. To calculate the perimeter of a cube, you multiply a side by 12. But what, now, are the possible perimeters of my family’s irregularly shaped Rubik’s Cube with one cube removed? Does it matter which cube my dog chewed off — the corner, center-side, or center? For the purpose of this puzzle, consider all cubes to be regular, 1.4cm to the side with no space between.

On New Year’s Eve, I finally got my access to Pinterest — the vision board-styled social photo sharing website — and have loved what it has added to my online experience.

GeekMom wrote about their experiences with the website several weeks ago, noting that it was great for discovering new project ideas for kids and home, as well as satisfying more specific interests. I’ve found the same to be true, with boards for Geeky things, inspiration for home remodeling, interesting technology, and even dissertation research. However, I’ve been most pleasantly surprised with how many new things come from this site that are missing from my Twitter, Facebook and Google streams. The significant presence of women on Pinterest is likely a big reason for this.

What do you get when you combine four Lego Mindstorms NXTs, a Samsung Galaxy SII, a Rubik’s Cube and two creative minds? You get a robot that can solve the brightly colored 3-D puzzle faster than a human.

CubeStormer II is the creative work of David Gilday and Mike Dobson. The NXT bricks are connected via Bluetooth to the Samsung smartphone. Once the unsolved cube is placed, a picture is taken by the phone, an app solves the puzzle and sends the solution to the NXT. Less than six seconds later, a solved Rubik’s Cube awaits.

See for yourself in the video above — just don’t blink.

That’s right, the CubeStormer II solved the puzzle in just 5.35 seconds. The fastest human solution to the puzzle was achieved this year at the World Cube Association’s Melbourne Winter Open — a time of 5.66 seconds.

I wonder what’s next for Dobson and Gilday — is it the 4×4 or 5×5 Rubik’s Cube? My guess is the world’s fastest solution for the cube while blindfolded will stay in human hands … at least for a while.

Three years later — around the same time The Empire Strikes Backdebuted — the re-branded Rubik’s Cube started its U.S. invasion via the Ideal Toy Corporation, which means it’s celebrating its 30th birthday this month, too. (Throw in Pac-Man, and May 1980 just about nails a perfect geek trifecta, no?)

While quickly becoming a full-on pop culture rage and earning Toy of the Year honors, though, the Rubik’s Cube also served as a sort of geek marker that other icons of the time didn’t. I was in elementary school at the time, and as the toy’s popularity increased, a social subset was formed: There were kids who had Rubik’s Cubes, and kids to whom others brought Rubik’s Cubes for solving.

While I’m a fan of the Rubik’s Cube, I’ll admit that my cubing skills probably peaked in fifth grade. I was tough to beat in the races we’d have on the school bus to “solve” specific colors, and if I could stumble my way into getting the eight corners in position, the solution was a given. (For a brief period, my friend Mike and I were a formidable tag-team duo: He could get the corners in position, and then I’d take over, blazing through the rest thanks to the moves I had memorized from a flimsy solution book.)

For other like-minded kids, the Rubik’s Cube also provided a nice hands-on lesson in the old-fashioned “Let’s take it apart and see how it works and whether we can put it back together” department. (Bonus points if you did this and then used petroleum jelly to speed up your cube for competitive reasons.)

At Rubiks.com, Ernő Rubik describes the appeal in terms that read like advice from a geek textbook: “It’s simple but it’s complex; it’s stable but it’s flexible; it’s easy to understand but it takes dedication and patience to work it out.” And, he notes, “Each decade or so, a new generation of Cube fans emerges, pushing the boundaries of the cubing and creating never-ending challenges.”

Over the years, there have been a few artists who have used Rubik’s cube as their medium and have illustrated everything from portraits to 8 bit videogames as their subject mater. The latest to be recognized for this decidedly geeky art form is Irish artist John Quigley. He also has chosen 8 bit games and portraits as his subjects, but what sets his work apart is the scale. He uses thousands of cubes to complete some of his pieces. For instance, this portrait of Barack Obama uses more than 2,600 of the mechanical puzzles to reproduce the likeness of our current president. That’s nearly 23,600 “pixels” to complete Obama’s lifelike depiction, an impressive feat when you consider Quigley’s palette consists of exactly six colors. This seems like an art form we could all get into … now does anyone know where we can find Rubik’s cubes in bulk?

For decades at Maroubra beach in Sydney there has sat looking out across the foreshore a concrete block. Over the years the tide has washed sand in and out, children have climbed and jumped from it, teenagers have leaned against it and young lovers have lain back for their first kiss.

But, in the middle of a warm December night, during what has been described as a 6-hour escapade involving two artists and a third "police look out" the concrete block was transformed.

Now, sitting in its place is a giant Rubik’s Cube. A small piece of geek culture has found its way to the foreshore amid the cool kids with their surfboards, bleached hair and sun tans.

At night…

Note: This post is dedicated to Graham Parker for his 26 years of persistence.